 We're professionals, rise above it, come on. Hey, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP Buzz Chat, and I'm here today with Ben. Hey, Ben. Hi, Christian, how's it going? So nice of you to pull yourself away from vacation and enjoy the interview. Benefiting from the home privileges. That's right. Well, hey, Ben, so people that don't know you for those three or four people in the world that don't know you and get spammed continually by your company with your face on stuff. Who are you? What do you do? Where are you located? All those details. Sure, thanks. So I'm Benjamin Nyland, MVP and Microsoft RD, and I work at a company called Sheer Gates. There, I work as the head of product trying to make sure we build the best product possible and doing the best we can. We focus in two aspects. So we are in the productivity cloud. So with Microsoft 365, we have a migration tool that's obviously very popular, which continues on to a governance tool as well. And in Azure, we have something that helps Azure Cloud Architects admins track their costs and manage to reduce them as much as possible but also help by seeing anomalies and see what's going on to be efficient in the way they manage. So I think we're, oh, I missed. We're from Montreal, and I'm currently at home in my backyard. We're all based in Montreal at Sheer Gates. Yeah, it's a great facility there. I visited once. That was four years ago. Yeah, we even changed office. We went, we changed floors. Now it's, I mean, we just changed office. And of course, all of this happened. So we're not benefiting it from much, but it's a beautiful location, beautiful office. So very excited. Are there, are there slides or firemen's poles or anything in between connecting? There's a, there's a skate park. There's the traditional barista in the corner. But other than that, I mean, really great, but we decided we focused more on meeting rooms and trying to get work done. But we do have quite a bit of fun stuff to get around. Well, that's a pretty amazing building. I mean, that whole building is really, what was it previously? It's, they used to build like wires for, like it's big engineering company, but back then really focused on copper wires and so on. I forget exactly, but yeah. It was like manufacturing, but it was like a factory. Yes, exactly. It was a giant factory that got transformed into our offices, amongst many other offices, of course. And aren't there living spaces as well? Is there condos? Yeah, people live in condos at the top, yeah. It's pretty incredible. I mean, it's a cool building. I would love something like that. I love it, love it. But, well, what's really cool, I was thinking about having this conversation and I'd love to get your perspective. One of the, you and I have talked about this, of course, and I was thinking about, when I was talking with Ducks a week ago, about when Jeff Teeper came back on board. In fact, Beatrice Oliveira with Bintuning, and she and I were talking about this as well. So it's something I've been thinking about the last couple of weeks. One of the conversations that I had with Teeper when he was coming back into his role, he left for a couple of years. You know, has long time been kind of the leader of the SharePoint world, now has Microsoft Teams, but he talked about, or we talked about how this then burgeoning area of ISVs that were building solutions around the look and feel for SharePoint, that he saw that with what they had planned for SharePoint that a lot of those companies would go away. Now since then, what we've seen is, you know, kind of a resurgence of SharePoint and the look and feel, of course, it's just a much different looking product. They've achieved so much, it's really cool. And yet that category of providers has exploded. So kind of my question for you is, looking at the broader, more broadly, the ISV space, you know, kind of how does it look from an ISP perspective working within the Microsoft ecosystem and specifically around SharePoint and Teams? That's a really good question, great to start. I could hear construction in the back. So the joys of working outside. It's a really good question. I thought we would ease into something a little bit easier at first. No, no way, we're gonna just jump right in. I think it's very, very different. And the sense that in the past, the Microsoft ecosystem was, okay, they build something every three years, which meant that they would likely miss something. What we mean by that is that they would do a lot of research and then they would build the product in the best way they thought possible to meet those customer needs and then they would ship it. And that allowed customers or vendors like us to be able to identify pain points when they were released. And we had at least a couple of years to be able to put ourselves inside, find a solution, build on top and evolve so much that we would have a extended value on top of it that would be hard for Microsoft to catch up. Today, Microsoft has completely changed. It's a SaaS company, it's a software as a service, they're product-led, they focus on metrics, they iterate quickly. If there's a customer paying, they attack it and they deliver it quickly. I think for ISVs, for companies that build product in that ecosystem, if we're taking it easy or too late back at the moment, it might be quite dangerous for some of the ISVs. Because by the time you identify what the customer pain you're trying to solve and then building it with your very few capabilities, whereas Microsoft has all the power of the hundreds of engineers or the marketing, it might be very difficult. So I would say that the landscape has changed. I find there's a lot of opportunities, speaking of which, there's a lot of opportunities, but you have to change the way you work. And instead of building these big solutions, we too all have to become SaaS companies, but in the true mindset of it, so product-led companies where we iterate quickly and adjust quickly, so very interesting. I don't know if I'm rambling on, but it's kind of a very interesting period. I think kind of what you're identifying, I mean, there's not like a single way of doing it, it is more one of those kind of ongoing theme topics to talk about what that actually looks like. Obviously, I'm not asking you to dig in and tell us what Sharegate is doing to kind of keep ahead of that specifically. I don't mind. I mean, but it has, it changed. It's the, I mean, we all see it where it happens on a weekly basis. There are announcements coming out of Microsoft for it might be small features and a lot of them are just incremental ads, but it's just a constant flow and it's a course across different workloads as well. But even if you look at one product, one workload, like Microsoft Teams in a 30 day period and go back and look at, and they're actually getting better at, they're talking about roadmap things that will, are coming as well as the features that are released. For a while, I mean, it was very much they're only talking about the things which are eminent that are being released or coming right out and they're talking more publicly about things that are down the road. So that ISV, so that, you know, customers can start to plan around those things. But it kind of comes back to that, you know, like, so what do you do to kind of keep in touch? And I mean, my thought was, and again, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you have to be more involved. It forces your hand to be more involved in the community to be talking with customers, to be aware of what's happening with Microsoft and to be out and tracking the trends of what's happening, where it's going. Absolutely. I mean, it's a combination of a couple of things, but you need to be more axed into what's going to happen next at Microsoft. So you have to understand, so obviously, I have a competitive advantage where I have access to the NDA roadmap that Microsoft is building, right? As an MVP, as an RD, that allows me to make better decisions, but I can't do that just with that because they don't tell us everything, of course. And you have to kind of be able to see what is on their mind. If you understand what, you know, we always used to joke around back in the day of the, oh, like the salespeople at Microsoft, like, oh, you're trying to meet your numbers and, but now it's not the salespeople, it's the product team that have metrics and they will impact you the most. So if you can understand where's Microsoft at right now, what are their goals and what are they betting on to get it? And you have some of the roadmap you can make, and again, nothing, if I knew exactly what we should do and when we should do it, and we'll all be millionaires, I hope, but the idea is you make the best decision that you can. And right now, if we analyze a little bit of the market, you know that Microsoft did an amazing job to get, they focused on engagement. So that means at first they weren't trying to build the next greatest thing since sliced bread, they wanted to make sure that the share point they had is used, they wanna make sure that exchange that they have is used. So all you heard was metrics around the Mao that we're talking about often, monthly active usage. How many monthly active people, users do you have? And all their focus was to make sure that on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, you had people that wanted to use their product and used it. Today, that's not what I'm detecting anymore. So I have to be mindful of that because what am I detecting is now they feel that they've got enough users, they've got enough active users in the market and it looks like they're behaving into what we call in product monetizing, right? So what they want now is how do I take the people that I have that are here every week and every day and every month and how do I convert them to paid users? So that's where we start seeing more and more features that are for E5, for Azure AD Premium. This is gonna come out, but this is gonna be for a premium feature. So what we're gonna see more and more is how can they build stuff that's going to increase the AR, so the value that they get from the customers that they have that are already regularly engaged. And that creates opportunity as well because as they focus on trying to make, monetize their current users, that can provide opportunities for ISVs to pinpoint a problem and solve it in a different way while they're trying to focus on monetizing their existing users, but a lot of hard work. Yeah, I think that there's, while you're talking about that building out and focusing on monetizing those customers that they have, I mean, part of what is, I think at the opposite end of that, you have like the release of the free version of Teams, you're pushing out to the masses of that long tail. And so yeah, it makes sense. And I mean, I guess it's arguable that they ever stopped looking at that perspective, but I think you're spot on. I mean, they used to develop a lot of features, a lot of capabilities, but until they started really launched into Office 365, they never really focused on, they certainly weren't being measured on whether people actually use that. And when, I think that the big breakthrough for a lot of people inside of Microsoft, especially on the sales side of the organization, it was when large organizations, massive customers that affected their numbers stopped renewing their enterprise agreements, or reducing that. And that caused, I mean, that was a discussion point in the community, certainly in the MVP and RD communities around the fact that Microsoft was they were signing all these new clients, but that hurts the long-term bottom line if you sell 100 licenses to a company and yet only 20 people are using the tool. When it comes up to the end of the year, the company, of course, would say, we're only gonna sign on in these 20 people, where only 20 licenses, not 100 licenses. And then there's value, of course, it's like, if you're not using it, it means you're not getting value, productivity, collaboration is not happening as well. Or you're using another product, and that's where I think they lost in a lot of spaces because they thought SharePoint was doing an amazing job or amazingly well because the licenses were being sold. But then if you went to the organization and was installed, but the usage, for so long in the community, I heard talks and I was one of them as well, we were doing talks and sessions on how to increase adoption. Like why, right? It's such an effort to make people use the product. So what would customers do is they would have the license, Microsoft thought they were doing well. And then of course, when you went to go see that company, the users went and went on Dropbox and they found other solutions, use the file share still, send attachments via email, and then you realize that, oh, so if a competitor comes, they could take the customer away from Microsoft easily because the user's not really invested in the platform. And that's what switched with Office 365. And I think that's why at first, the affordable Office 365 will give you everything, but we're gonna measure all of our teams on how frequently do people come back and use it. And once they got the hook-in and everyone or millions of users worldwide are now actively using the app, all of the apps all the time, I think Teams is still in its beginner stage, so Teams must still be in engagement mode. But now it's like, okay, so now that we have these millions per week, per month, how can we make them go to E5? How can I increase the value of my customer that is already using my product? And if they fail, the customer's still on Office 365 so they can try again. Well, that's why I think so many of the features that we see, it has more to do with building those consistent behaviors across the workloads. I always use the example of going into any workload, any product within the Microsoft ecosystem and hitting the share button. As you're well aware, two years ago, you'd hit the share button in five different products, you've had five different experiences, the menus, the options, even the verbiage, the freezing was different. And so they said, and another great example was as we'd always ask, it's like, why is OneDrive, and OneDrive for Business, which is SharePoint, why does it look entirely different than when I go into SharePoint and I'm doing the same thing? Isn't it just another type of document library and shouldn't it look and function the same way? And it was kind of a big deal when they revamped the look and feel and there's the little issues with the sync engine, but that had to be fixed as well. But the look and feel and the way that we approach it where it should look exactly the same function, exactly the same, and then the share button, if I go hit a share and share to email, it should look and operate exactly the same no matter what workload I'm going through. And that's something that a lot of these incremental behaviors, like I just did in the GlobalCon event, I did a session on tasks, task management across Microsoft 365. And so many of the little innovations are coming across and where we see advances. I mean, right now that you have cool alignment between planner and to do into some degree to project online, although there are still gaps that are there, a lot of the integrations in between the list apps, the list app and the task apps which are both coming so that it all works the same way. And while they're there, I'm not trying to say that there's gonna be, you give me up and I'll go create a task anywhere you are within Microsoft 365, but that path is there, that roadmap, that future look, I can imagine that. If I'm co-editing a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet with three people in the middle of the night, and we're in there, I can mention somebody and it creates a to-do notification which automatically shows up that you could then possibly right there from that interface I could see being able to promote that notification into a task within planner for that project where that document lives. A bunch of that kind of stuff, that's what Microsoft is going to do to bridge the gaps which helps both with providing richer data, richer interactions for those E5, those more expensive licenses, as well as just helping with that adoption usage capability. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, there's a lot of- Yeah, it is challenging the ISV space for sure. We have to look into, so you're asking like how do we look into, well we try to do our best to understand what they're trying to do at Microsoft, what is the roadmap and then making the best decisions with the data we have. I always like to ask people the question kind of on the back and maybe this was the easier question you were looking for. Ben, what's your favorite color? No, so how do you personally, individually kind of keep up? What are your favorite go-to sites or resources to keep up with what's happening? It's a good question. To be honest, I don't think I keep up as well as I did. I think that's the right answer. None of us really do, but yeah. Because I mean, a lot of the times I realized that once it's actually publicly announced, I still have time to figure out, okay, I do keep up with everything announced as much as possible, whether it's on Twitter because I follow the rights that all the people in the product team that in, at least the product marketing, which I know are gonna talk about their releases at some point. So on Twitter, I've reduced quite a bit the amount of people I'm following to make sure that I get the content that I want specifically to go get when I go there. The roadmap, the tech community, and I'm always on the watch on what's going on. But more, again, part of the MVP slash RD, we have by weeklies, we have calls. So I always kind of really see where they're going ahead, but it might be in a year that it comes out and it might be a little bit different, but it's still, I just take notes as I go. Otherwise, what I would be doing is really focus on, there's a tech community website where they share all their blogs, all their release. There's a roadmap site, which I know some companies have even built a custom tool that every day analyzes everything that was added, everything that was removed, and it's just pulled the difference type of thing. And then I follow the right people on Twitter. And that's usually, I mean, knowing the right people is you just go on the blog, you see who wrote it, who communicated, and it comes down to the same 10 people in Office 365 about. So it's not too much to follow either. Yeah, I think that's the sort of right answers, the common tools there, as you said, Microsoft tech community, I point people to, where do you get a lot of that? Where do you actually start? I said, go take a look at the Microsoft 365 blog. It's those 10 people that are actively blogging, sharing the information that's happening. And that's who I get to go and follow. I mean, there's certainly other community resources that are out there. I'm a fan of Carol and Daniel and Alastair that they're regarding 365 team. Then I'd have to pick one and then I'd forget someone. So the official Microsoft one is the one I recommend. But yes, tons of people in the community have done some great job, regular podcasts, and there's tons and tons of ways to get your information. Yep. Well, that's great. Well, Ben, really appreciate your time chatting today and let you get back to enjoying time out in the backyard with the dog and the beautiful weather. Appreciate it. So I think in Montreal, so you're in your summer period, that ends in what, two weeks? Then winter again? No, our summer is actually pretty hot and pretty long, just like our winter is pretty cold and pretty long as well. So we basically have, we always joke, we say we have three seasons in Montreal. We have winter, summer, and construction. And that's pretty much what it is, is the winter is super long, it's cold, but the summer it's really hot and we enjoy it. Usually, obviously these days, not so much, but we do the best I can with what we've got. I think we've got those construction weather patterns down here. Joking that the freeway, there's just so much growth that's happening here. When we moved from Seattle to Utah four years ago, this section of freeway was all under construction, still all under construction. It's just crazy. But yeah, good times. Well, hey, Ben, hope to see you sooner rather than later, maybe October? October, I think? Yeah, yeah, we'll see. But great talking to you. Cheers.